Roslindale, West Roxbury teachers rally to protest contract stalemate

Thursday

Jan 19, 2012 at 12:01 AMJan 19, 2012 at 7:22 PM

Fed up after a 20-month stalemate in their contract negotiations with Boston Public Schools officials, Parkway and citywide members of the Boston Teachers Union braved the cold Wednesday, Jan. 18, to rally outside the Boston School Committee Headquarters at 26 Court St. in protest.

Todd Feathers/Wicked Local correspondent

Fed up after a 20-month stalemate in their contract negotiations with Boston Public Schools officials, Parkway and citywide members of the Boston Teachers Union braved the cold Wednesday, Jan. 18, to rally outside the Boston School Committee Headquarters at 26 Court St. in protest.

Among the approximately 1,000 union members in the crowd was Rob Carroll, who has taught special education at Roslindale’s Charles Sumner Elementary School for 18 years. After the school day ended, Carroll bundled himself in a thick winter coat, hat, scarf and gloves and drove off with five of his fellow teachers to catch the orange line to Government Center for the protest.

Carroll said he loves teaching at Sumner, but was going to the rally to help call attention to the problems facing other Boston teachers. “We’re having trouble getting our message out and that’s why we’re doing these activities,” said Carroll. “It’s a very simple message: Talk to teachers.”

The “Talk to Teachers” slogan was visible everywhere, printed on bright blue signs, a billboard truck, shouted through megaphones and echoed by the crowd. If the teachers’ only goal was to make themselves heard, they succeeded.

As protestors poured out of the Government Center T station they lined up to grab colored cowbells, horns and whistles from several large boxes provided by the union. For over an hour a cacophony of ringing, whistling and chants of “contract now” drowned out the usual sounds of Court Street.

The focus on noisemaking emphasized a complaint echoed time and again by teachers at the rally: That their message is going unheard by the public and being misrepresented by the news media.

“We’re getting portrayed as ungrateful louts,” said Paul Tenney, a retired high school teacher who taught for 34 years in Boston. “We just want to get our point of view across. Up until now this has been an almost media blackout.”

As teachers circled the School Committee building a few climbed on window ledges to show their signs to the people inside.

The 10-20 police officers maintaining order during the rally told the protestors to climb down, but the mood was relaxed and the officers’ primary duty was ensuring that none of the protestors spilling off the sidewalk and onto the street were hit by traffic.

Roots of the problem

Since August, union negotiators and school district officials have been unable to compromise on a variety of controversial issues in the new contract. Among the most contentious issues for teachers are proposals to increase the school day by up to three hours and an $84 million difference in the pay raise budget proposed by the union and that proposed by the school district.

“I think that we recognize that the teachers were here yesterday,” joked Matthew Wilder, spokesman for the Boston Public Schools. He went on to say, “we are at the bargaining table to negotiate, but again, $116 million is unreasonable.”

School officials had proposed a $32 million cost-of-living pay increase for teachers, while the union is asking for $116 million to compensate them for the extra time they say they are already putting in.

Wilder said Boston schoolteachers are among the highest paid in the state, and he reiterated the school district’s stance, saying teachers are already well compensated for their 6 ½-hour workdays.

But teachers say they work much more than they are required and than the school district is letting on. “We don’t work a 6 ½-hour day,” said Joanne Delahanty, who spoke passionately about her union’s struggles over the zipped-up top of her puffy red coat. “People bring work home and come to school early.”

She said many of her fellow teachers arrive at school at 7 a.m. to begin preparing for class and stay until 6 p.m. to help with after-school activities.

Many of the teachers at the rally said they weren’t even opposed to the proposed increase in the school day, as long as they were fairly compensated.

“We’re very conscious of the difficult times we’re in, economy-wise,” said Carroll, who is also on the union’s executive board. “We just want a fair wage for the work we do.”

Proposals have been floated to increase teachers’ wages indirectly by compensating them for their students’ good grades. Wilder said everyone recognizes that Boston has great teachers, but that the district, parents and students want them spending more time with the kids. “When students make growth, (teachers) would be recognized for it financially,” said Wilder.

A small delegation from Boston United for Students, a group composed of parents and students who want to make sure students are not forgotten in the negotiation process, attended the rally. They are requesting that teachers spend more time with students and that the school district has more flexibility in which teachers it retains.

Erica Sanchez, mother of three children in the Boston public schools, said she wants the district to have “the possibility of hiring teachers not because of seniority, but because they’re doing a good job.”

Delahanty, who has been teaching for 24 years, eight at Sumner, said she didn’t think there needed to be changes with the teacher evaluation process.

“Believe me, people don’t want to work with bad teachers,” she said.

She became a teacher, she said, in order to help the kids who needed her most, “not ‘I want my students’ scores to be high so I make more money.’”

Representatives of the firefighters union, postal workers union, Massachusetts AFL-CIO, and other unions were at the rally to offer their support. And many union representatives claimed the ongoing contract battle was part of a union-bashing campaign by outside interest groups, although they did not identify who those groups were.

“People are telling us what to do,” said Carroll. “But who but school teachers, dedicated public school teachers, knows what’s best for the kids.”

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